ED WOOD is a heartfelt valentine to talentless but fearless artists
everywhere. It documents the life of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the
cult figure known as "The Worst Director of All Time" for such insanely
bad flicks of the 1950s as GLEN OR GLENDA?, BRIDE OF THE MONSTER and
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. Johnny Depp plays the young Wood as
a
broadly cartoonish figure, never quite turning him into a completely
believable character, but his cheerful enthusiasm is completely
infectious, his Ed Wood an unflappable go-getter with a complete
inability to accept any setback. Depp's light performance is
counterbalanced by Martin Landau, who is stunning as the aging,
unemployed and morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi, whom Wood hires to star
in a series of low-budget disasters. Landau, who rightly won
Best
Supporting Actor for his work, is the heart of the film, the tragic
figure in the center of a gang of crazies and freaks that made up
Wood's coterie of friends. Although physically wrong for
Lugosi -
too tall and too long-faced - Landau becomes the Hungarian horror icon
and is greatly aided by monster-movie master Rick Baker's award-winning
makeup. Landau is so amazing in the role, ED WOOD almost runs
out
of steam when Lugosi passes away a half hour before ED WOOD ends.

The rest of the cast is
near-perfect, with
standouts including Bill Murray as gay actor Bunny Breckinridge and
Patricia Arquette as Wood's sweet, understanding girlfriend.
Jeffrey Jones as nutty fake psychic Criswell and Lisa Marie as buxom
TV-hostess Vampira contribute to the fun, while wrestler George "The
Animal" Steele is virtually indistinguishable from Wood favorite Tor
Johnson.

Although on the surface, the
story is about
how a young director managed to make three of the worst films of all
time on nothing but a smile and a shoeshine, ED WOOD is actually about
one strange, cross-dressing man, who, unable to live in the real world,
builds worlds of his own on movies sets and populates them with a broad
collection of like-minded outcasts, like a Don Quixote picking up
multiple Sancho Panzas on his travels. As Depp says in the
film,
if he judged any of his friends, he wouldn't have any. It is
on
this level that ED WOOD really shines.

Gorgeously shot in black and
white, ED WOOD
did poorly at the box-office, but has gone on to become as much as cult
film as any of Ed Wood's "classics". - JB